A really annoying item in the news yesterday reported that, next week, Department of Education (“DOE”) Secretary Linda McMahon is launching a fifty-state “Returning Education to the States” tour to focus on eliminating the federal DOE and supposedly thereby bringing education back to the states. Quoth McMahon: “Education isn’t decided in Washington, DC. It is shaped in our schools, our neighborhoods, and by the people who know our children best.”
What a royal crock! Education is most definitely not “shaped in our schools, our neighborhoods, and by the people who know our children best.” Quite to the contrary, education is shaped by the university education departments, by the state departments of education, by the state legislatures, and by the teachers’ unions.
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Neighborhoods and parents have nothing whatever to do with it. Even school boards are not makers of education policy. The school board’s job is simply to implement the policy handed down from the state legislature and the state Department of Education.
The only question here is whether Secretary McMahon is a villain or a fool. Does she intend to deceive the public, or is she just an innocent fool whom the real powers have sent forth to make smoke?
In education, as in all areas of our public life, people are policy. If we want to change the policy, we must change the people in charge. If the voters or the president’s administration truly want to put parents and school boards in charge of education, then their path must be cleared of state boards, university departments, and teachers’ unions.
One key specific here is to repeal the certification requirement for teachers. All that most teacher certification mandates across America do is ensure that teachers come out of hard-left education programs. Currently, only a handful of states allow people into classrooms without a degree in education, and they do so only in temporary situations to fill classroom deficits (e.g., Arizona, California, Texas, Missouri, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Mississippi). Florida is the only state that is really experimenting with doing away entirely with the education degree requirement.
Having said that, the real question is whether there is a connection between certification and qualification, and the answer is that there certainly is. The time spent in college taking “education” classes is time not spent acquiring subject matter knowledge. A history-ed major is not a history major; a math-ed major is not a math major...far from it.
Most of one entire college year’s class load is spent on ed courses rather than subject matter courses. And, as noted, without exception, the programs that confer bachelor’s degrees in education train their students in leftism.
Returning education policy to the parents means returning education policy to the school boards. We need to empower school boards to take charge of education and hire whoever they deem qualified without being hamstrung by state certification.
Smoke-generation tours by glib-tongued DOE Secretaries will only serve to keep parents locked out of policy.